


Seek to Mend

by TheMartian



Category: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Filth, M/M, naked greek wrestling scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 16:14:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5749753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMartian/pseuds/TheMartian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Achilles has disappeared at a crucial moment in battle. When he finally returns, his spirit and body are broken and it is up to Patroclus to nurse him back to health. The fate of the war depends on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seek to Mend

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'm completely open to comments/suggestions, especially suggestions for a new fic--working on a Star Wars: TFW Vietnam AU if you're into that, so check it out once it's up!

_Our two souls therefore, which are one,_  
_Though I must go, endure not yet_  
_A breach, but an expansion,_  
_Like gold to airy thinness beat._

\--John Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

*****

I spend the morning on hands and knees, washing blood from the floor of the physicians’ tent. My mind is wired with the frantic energy of sleeplessness. There had been an ambush outside the gates of Troy, and many of our men had been injured. Machaon and I had worked through the night, working arrows through tender, bruised flesh. Blood welled up from their wounds, the tang of it rancid and spilled raised bile in my throat, but the concentration of surgery made me keep a steady stomach. 

Most of them had bitten through their lips trying not to scream. The pain showed in their eyes instead, glossed over and moist. Careful not to let a tear spill down their cheeks, balancing them on the edges of their eyes. 

And even when the last man had been given a covering for his wound and the final poultice had been applied, their groans and shallow, ragged breaths had stolen sleep from me. I kept vigil until dawn filtered in through the slits of the tent flap. No man would be lost under my care. 

Even still, blood seeps beneath my fingernails in thin strips. Whether it is that of Trojans or the Myrmidons, I could not be sure. 

I sluice another pail of water to dilute the last of the blood. It webs through the flagstones like a dying galaxy. 

“Be careful!” Feet leap just beyond the reach of the fetid water as sunlight blasts in through the wide open tent flap. My eyes adjust themselves as Briseis comes into focus, raising the draped folds of her tunic from the floor. 

“You look as though you’ve been staring at the sun,” Briseis muttered. Her soft accented voice gives her sentence lyrical phrases that rise and swell like a warrior song. I remember Achilles’ singing voice, his fingers plucking at the strings of my mother’s lyre. He has not sung for me--for anyone--since the war began. 

I rubbed at my eyes, rising to meet her. My knees have gone numb from the pressure of the floor, and I stumble a bit. “It’s been a busy night.”

“Then you did not sleep beside Achilles last night?”

“I have not seen him since fitting his armor yesterday.”

Beyond, I could hear the waking strains of the camp: Cook fires with their stinging smoke diluting the morning light. Low-voiced chatter among the soldiers, elbows balanced on knees as they traded palaver while the rich, thick scent of smoked meats rose from their fires.

Briseis ran her fingers over the table of surgical instruments. “Then you don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

“That Achilles is missing.”

#

I had run to the furthest shores of Phthia, trying to escape their notice. The younger boys in training had strong-armed Achilles and I into playing a game of _apodidraskinda._ Achilles had dashed off at first count, but I was desperate for a hiding place. The seeker had long since finished his count. 

The Gods sent winds that whipped the overhanging boughs into a frenzy, the pale underbellies of their leaves flashed from the canopies overhead. The wind-gnarled limbs of a large fig tree opened themselves to me, its trunk split into a large hollow. Large enough for me to fit inside. The tree’s ripe fruit hung from drooping branches in fat teardrops. I plucked one as I approached and bit. Raw flesh and sweet seeds. It dripped from my chin, the juice a marker of my greed. 

“Only a fool eats before they are ripe.” The voice came from the hollow. Achilles. 

He remained in the shadow of the tree, but his eyes made pinpricks in the darkness. Sheepish, I wiped juice from my mouth. My hiding place was compromised. “I’ll find another place, I—“

He grasped my slender wrists, my hands still those of a boy’s despite my fifteen years.

“They will not find us here.”

He pulled me in and our mouths found each other: my lips rough, cracked. Nervously dry. But Achilles’ were soft as soapstone, firm and tasting of sea salt and goat’s milk. I let my fingers run through the tangle of his golden curls, rays of the sun set atop his head. I pulled him in closer. He bit my lower lip and it ran through me like a shock. But I didn’t pull back. I wanted to taste all of him. To swallow his godhead whole. If my lips touched enough of his warm skin, I too could become divine. 

Instead, I explored the sharp bow of his collarbones, the hollow of his neck. I held back a smile when I saw the pleasure it brought him. I bit into his flesh, sweet and crisp like honeyed pears. His chest swelled with a soft moan. 

Achilles’ hands came to rest on my legs, slipping in between my thighs. He took me in his grasp, battle-hardened hands working quickly, his grip soft. In three quick strokes, it was over: I gave a breathy groan and collapsed into shudders. But Achilles would not be cheated of his turn.

He pushed me on to the yellowed wisps of grass, crouched on my elbows in the dirt. I gave a gasp at his brusqueness. He pulled at my hair by the roots, tugging gently on the crown and it sent electric pulses through me so that his pleasure became mine. 

#

I return to my tent that morning, looking for any sign of Achilles’ presence. The Gods are the bearers of his fate alone. It occurs to me that perhaps his mother has stolen him away. But even Thetis would not be so foolish as to intervene in the affairs of the other Gods. She is as set upon his fate as any—upon his glory—and I contemplate the endless cruelties of a mother’s love. 

Our tent flaps are undisturbed. I push them in, half-expecting to see him sprawled on the floor, head resting in cupped hands. It was all a game, he’d say. And you’ve found me. But Achilles is nowhere to be found. Instead, I look for his imprints. A rumpled bedroll. His soiled tunic. A drop of blood. 

But there is nothing. Only the sighing wind. And the battle-worn cries of men, their limbs torn from them. The whispered moans of the souls still left on the blood-soaked earth beyond the gates of Troy. 

*****

I do not know how long I sleep, the passage of time distorted in the wake of an irregular day. But there is a shocking stillness. Not even the late night revelries of soldiers, boasting of the day’s bloodshed. 

I reach beside me for my tunic, but a hand clamps over my mouth, hugging tight to my body. My muscles clench and I thrash again my captor wildly, until he instructs me: “Do not scream, Patroclus.”

It is the voice of Achilles. Lips brushing past my ear, his voice sweet as a song in his throat. Gentle and hushing as a new mother. 

He releases me and I shift to meet his face, only shifting outlines of shadows in the blackness. His form is swallowed beneath the cloth of his tunic and that of the bedroll. Even still, his muscles push against my frame, his narrow hips next to mine. 

“Thank the Gods you have returned.” I hold a hand to his face, feeling his sharp, high cheekbones. But they are pulled tight in a frown. 

“We must lose this war.”

“No. It is prophesied. We cannot lose to Troy, no matter what. Because of you, Achilles, aristos Achaion.” 

“But the Gods have their prophecies for me, too. Greece will win this war, but I will lose.”

“You only need a good night’s rest.” 

“I can sleep no more. Only dream. I close my eyes but sleep never comes. I don’t see the dark of sleep; I see past it. I see bodies. Split open and flayed by my spear.” 

His breaths grow shallow. Even in the warm summer breeze, he catches a chill. His form reaches for mine, but his body seems a hollow shell. Eyes fixed to a point only the Gods can see. 

“You cannot reject the life you were bred for.”

“Just stay the night with me. And in the morning, we can sail for Peleus. By the month’s end we could be sipping the sun-sweetened wine of the south.”

“Enough of this talk. I need rest. And so do you. Tomorrow Troy might breach our walls, and there will be many wounded—“

“Please.” 

The son of a God does not beg. Yet here was Achilles as a supplicant, God-made for war, the first beads of tears forming. I took his hand in mine. A hand that had spilled the blood of hundreds if not thousands, enough to fill the cisterns of Athens. A hand that had stroked the first sparse outcropping of whiskers that had bristled beneath my chin. The hand that made me first know pleasure. 

“Make me a promise. You will fight in this war. I will not let your fear soil your reputation.”

“This isn’t about fear.” Achilles draws a long, ragged breath inward. “Do not mistake my reluctance for cowardice, Patroclus. I am not afraid of Troy. I am not afraid of death itself. I have only one fear in this world.”

“Name it.”

“That you might die before me.”

He buried his face in the bedroll, pressing a cheek to my chest. I smoothed down a lick of his hair with my palm, feeling the scars raised in battle down his back. 

“The Gods do not play dice,” I reasoned.

“To them, we are a game,” he breathed, his face sullen. Achilles is a champion, a victor. But I know for certain he will lose this game in the end. 

#

The great halls of King Peleus had been scrubbed bone white by his servants in preparation. The festival day was upon us. We had all been sent from our quarters, and the other fostered sons of Phthia had abandoned their tunics in a heap in the yard for their exercises. Sweat dried on their backs. Their skin sun-baked as the clay pots servants hoisted on their backs, carrying in the evening supply of wine. 

I hung back from the jostling mass of them. They looked like men grown, though most were no older than I. could not help but cling the draped cloth tighter to myself in shameful modesty. My fine-boned frame, thin fluted wrists and hollow caved chest were cause for ridicule. 

Sea winds from the Aegean blew in hot gusts. The sun burned down in dying rays, fingered out across the coppered sky. Achilles had not once called for me that day. No doubt I would not see him at the hall, either. 

The herd of boys shifted, and I was swept up in a wave of them filtering into the hall. Some wrestled tunics back over their shoulders. 

Peleus was already seated, his table reserved for relatives or advisors only. I no longer counted myself among the princes. Only an exile. Achilles sat beside him.

For the first time in years, Achilles looked the part of a prince. The dirt had been scraped from his fingernails, hair still damp from washing. Anointed with the finest oils shipped from across the seas in Macedonia. The sweet-scented perfume of jasmine wafted by, its high notes cutting above the serving plates piled with curds of goat milk and plump geese, their hot juices running off the plates. 

Tureens of broad beans and buttery sweet peas steamed before us. I scooped up some mashed beans with a crust of spelt flour bread. Achilles did not touch his food, his lips deep in a horn-shaped drinking cup. Wine spilled from his lips and down his front. 

I saw his face flush as crimson as the wine he swallowed. His gaze soft and unfocused. Until his dark eyes lifted from their heavy-lidded state. He was staring at me. 

“Patroclus.” Achilles spoke my name not as an order, but as a prayer. A God-song. Soft and commanding. I rose, automatically. 

“You shall sit beside us.”

Peleus conferred politely, sotto, to his son. “The table is reserved for our blood alone.”

“There is space enough beside me. We shall fill it. Come, Patroclus.”

I was caught between the will of Prince Achilles and his father. Peleus saw my dilemma, and my obedience, a hesitance in it. He conceded to me with a small nod.

I knelt before him in gratitude, my cheeks hot and foolish. Then I ascended to sit beside the throne of Achilles. Nervousness thrummed in my throat as the eyes of the other boys watched my ascent. I sat stiffly beside Achilles, but could not bring myself to eat. 

He nudged me. “Go on.”

Slowly, I dipped my fingers into a dish of fat-pitted olives. Achilles mirrored me, taking one and crushing it, dripping, between his fingers. “You can have as many as you like. See?” He flung the broken, mashed flesh of the olive to the ground. 

“Do you miss your family, Patroclus?”

I did not answer immediately, thinking of my simple-minded mother’s smile, how she would try and count the grains of sand as we lay on the shore, losing count and letting the grains be swept from her fingers in the wind. My hard-hearted father, disappointment carved like an epitaph on his face. 

“Would you think less of me if I said no?”

“If blood made a true bond, then I would name every man I ever killed as my brother.”

“They are still more deserving members than I.”

“I would not have you as my brother.” Achilles poured himself another dram of wine. 

The oil lamps burned low on the table. They each contained a small universe of their own, glowing outward and striking the high planes of Achilles’ cheeks and forehead. It made him look older, throwing shadows behind him that doubled his lean form into a giant. 

“Then what would you have me as?”

“My companion.”

#

The days drag by with the monotony of camp maintenance: mending the canvas of tents torn to tatters by the wind and sweeping of the charred remnants of fires. High summer holds the earth in its grasp. Boiling days and sunburnt legs. The gossamer wings of dragonflies beat through the air in pulses, willing the earth to life again. The heat only serves to upset the soldiers who pick fights like boys. 

Agamemnon stalks his way through the camp. Five years of war have made the ground beneath our camp hard-packed as clay, littered with the shards of broken pots and torn lengths of cloth. Around him, the soldiers are a reminder of his faltering command. Their taste for blood has long soured in their mouth. The stalemate of the war is normally broken by Achilles’ tireless enthusiasm, the daily reports of a God-sent spear darting through the hollow of man’s chest, his body pinioned to the dirt.

But now Achilles turns away meal after meal. His cheeks grow hollow. I shove slices of an apple into his hands, begging him to eat, regain his strength. If the war should not kill him starvation will. But he will do nothing but collapse on the bedroll after shedding the day’s armor like a boiled crab, eyes locked to the canvas of our tent. 

The moon above is painted in quick strokes, swollen with a champagne glow. We lie silent and dark as the grave, and Achilles shifts his weight to relieve the pressure of my body against his. Tonight, as most nights, he spends a light sleep fighting off shadows invisible to me, tossing, sweating. I miss the memory of his fingernails leaving curved crescent moons on my hips. 

For mortals, time flies in a straight arrow. But the demigod Achilles’ course runs crooked. Past, present, and future foretold at his birth. Death for me exists only as a variable. Achilles is both dead and alive at once, a life spent in anticipation of a single misstep in battle, a cracked shield, a death knell. I cannot imagine who might master him on the battle field. Only Achilles could kill Achilles, aristos Achaion, the best warrior in all of Greece. Still, it occurs to me that Achilles could easily master his own fate, drive his own spear through his stomach and hold in his guts suspended in his fingers, laughing wildly at the fates. I try to shake the thought from my mind without success. Sighing, I turn my face to the doorway as I lie on the bedroll, wondering who is this ghost that I have come to love. 

*****

My fingers have become nimble in service of the war. Nothing that would outmatch Achilles’ speed, but a close second. I pick the shrapnel from the shoulders of men, their muscles sliced through in deep valleys. Their flesh parts in hungry red mouths. 

“Make way!” Two men rush the door, a body draped limply between their arms: Achilles. 

A spear point is lodged in his side between his ribs. The gash sweats blood, his eyes dim and unfocused. 

I push away the thoughts of our boyhood spent together: swimming in the southern seas after a day’s training with Chiron. Gathering wildflowers and tasting the nectar of honeysuckle that grew in thick clumps, the sap staining our lips powdery yellow. Achilles’ gentle teasing draped in a woman’s tunic, batting his eyelashes and flashing his wrists, his body bent and dancing like a stream. I erase it all. He is just a patient, only flesh to be mended and made new. 

“Lay him here.” I motion to a cot. His tunic is torn down to his waist, stained from where his blood has snaked down his belly in pools feathered at the edges. 

I pluck a spring of dried yarrow from our stock of herbs and crush it beneath a mortar and pestle. The leaves fan out and swell in a cup of hot water that I hold to Achilles’ lips. “Drink.” He drinks deeply of the honey-colored liquid before falling back, hair damp and streaked with blood. 

My fingers press into the cut, trying to unhook the spear from within him. Achilles breathes in grunts, and I whisper a silent apology. The metal is worked free, but its cast is familiar. It’s Greek, skillfully forged. Achilles’ own spearhead, driven through his side.

*****

Whispers of Achilles’ injury spreads among the soldiers. Their gossip around fires at night hushes lower as I pass on the way to our tent, trying to catch sleep between hours of attending to him. He heals more quickly than most despite the blood he’s lost. 

Still, it is three days until his fog is broken. Three fevered days in which I wipe sweat and dirt from his cheeks with cool rags, letting him suckle on a moistened sponge to slake his thirst. Three days before his first waking words pass his lips.

_Patroclus._ Like stones skipping across still waters. 

I abandon the cabinet of herbs and rush to him. My half-mixed unguents leave a sharp, lingering scent. 

His fingers fumble at the bandage across his chest. “Please,” he moans. “I do not want your medicine.”

“It will open again if you unwrap it.”

“Once I heal, they will send me out again.” I stay his hand, the sharp knobs of his wrists writhing under my palm. “I need more time.”

So do we both. I had prayed for it, but the only response I found was the eyes of Thetis raising gooseflesh on my arms. A coldness rose like a hollow in my heart when I prayed to the gods who never answered. To Thetis, the war was her son’s salvation. I, his kidnapper. Yet I would delay the war for an eternity if I could. Until the maggots found a home in my skin and  
my bones were picked clean by crows and turned to dust. Until we reached the ground where Achilles and I could rest in the infinite stretch of time, twin ashes burned from the same fire. 

Achilles once again passes into sleep and his fingers go limp in mine. After redoing his bandage, I kneel to kiss his forehead and close my eyes next to him, pressed to his cheek, wondering if this is what eternity might feel like. 

*****

As Achilles’ flesh knits together and his strength returns, Greece struggles to defend its position. Troy sweeps closer each passing day, their fear abated in Achilles’ absence. 

I press him into venturing through camp, each day walking a bit further, stretching his recovery. The spear had just nicked the edge of his lungs, and I know that each breath he takes is fire to him. But he never shows, greeting the camp and boasting of a speedy recovery. Complaining of jealousy and the longing for bloodshed. Only I know of his untruth. 

*****

I flash awake to a hot needle of pain slicing through my lip, split, bleeding. And Achilles shouting, low and throaty next to my ear. Blood beneath his fingernails. My own. His limbs jerk in a cruel marionette’s dance, caught between the worlds of Gods and men, sleep and wake.

“Achilles.” I whisper to him. The tension melts from him, and he awakes with teeth clenched. The blood from my lip spreads in petals between us. 

“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to--,”

“I probably deserved it,” I joke. The back of my hand streaks with red, and I try to lick the cut on my lip clean, the hot salt of it on my tongue. 

I wish that I could heal him. That if we could seek to mend ourselves our flesh would combine until we healed each other, my skin to his. I hold him like a child, back to belly and we sleep as one creature.

*****

Morning spills through us as I wake beside Achilles, face half in shadow. Breathing in soft gasps through a fragile chest and sallow skin. His eyes are open without seeing.

“Achilles,” I try. There is no answer. I brush my lips softly against his cheek, but still he does not stir. I lie back against him, breathing in sync with him, exhaling softly on his neck.

Briseis breaks my vigil. She has woven her hair into a thick braid at the crown, a dark wreath of laurel. 

“Agamemnon has asked for you.” Her eyes are drawn to Achilles’ figure curled on the bed. 

“Agamemnon can wait,” I explain. Briseis ventures closer, careful not to disturb. 

“Go. I will look after him.” She dips a hand into a cloth sack hung on her shoulder and pulls a crust of bread from it. “For you.”

I rise and try to pass her, but she stops me hard with a hand to my chest.

“I won’t let you go without eating. Take it,” she insists.

I mutter thanks and scurry from the tent, tearing off dry hunks of bread with my teeth and gulping them down roughly. Nerves make swallowing a challenge. 

I hear Agamemnon before I see him, consulting an advisor. 

“The men grow tired of war. We are nearing a decade in battle.”

“Then the men are cowards.” I can hear the spit fleck from his lips, neck strained with sinews raised in ridges. “What would you have me do?”

Even questions are stated as commands. The guards outside his tent have their heads angled away as a polite gesture, but his voice carries through the canvas nonetheless. 

I consider approaching some other time, feigning illness and requesting another meeting once his rage has cooled. But the guards lift aside the tent flaps, flesh peeled from an unripe fruit, and the coolness of the inside air swallows me.

“Patroclus.” Agamemnon ignores his advisor, but greets me only with a disinterested toss of his head. 

“I came at your request.”

“You are charged with Achilles’ recovery, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Are you well trained in the art of medicine?”

“I was instructed by Chiron alongside Achilles, during the time we spent on Phthia.”

“Good.” Agamemnon runs his finger on the tip of his spear. It has been shined almost to white, the underbelly of a sparrow driven into the hearts of men. “The perhaps you can cure him of his malingering.”

Agamemnon’s accusation is coarse and unseemly, though I know that he is right. He is sharp of mind as well as tongue. Still, I protest. “His strength is still returning to him.”

“I’ve seen him display vigor enough. Around you.” Agamemnon hesitates a breath. “The shield of night may dark the eyes, but it does not dull the ears, and Achilles is anything but quiet.” 

I flush in a hot streak across the bridge of my nose. “I will persuade him,” I mutter.

“Very good,” he agrees. He does not need say more, because I am already stumbling from his tent half-mad with embarrassment. 

*****

Patroclus tells Achilles the deaths are on him each day he isn’t out in the field. Patroclus must deal with Achilles’ shortcomings every day in the medical tent. Every day he sees how many more men impaled, limbs severed, the rifts in their skin widen as blood drains. 

Achilles wears his scars as if he were born to bear them. They follow the curve of skin over muscle, cut across ridges of bone as a testament to pain, a sacrifice of beauty for honor. He begs me to rid him of them using any balm I can.

I grind yellow petals of rue to a paste and mix them with oil. I drizzle it over Achilles’ back, his sore shoulders and down his spine. He gasps at the cooling effect of the salve, but allows me to push against his flesh, rubbing it into his skin and against his muscles. His scar has healed into a hard ridge. 

“You’ve healed well. Cleanly. Agamemnon will be glad when you return.”

“To hell with Agamemnon.” 

“Greece is struggling without you. You have to go back sometime.” Achilles twists his head around. His should muscles jump with my hands still on his skin.

“You don’t know battle. You only saw the tip of it before you retreated into camp.”

“You are not the only one that has seen death in this war. Everyday I watch men beg for mercy, for their mothers, the Gods. For death. And death is the only one that ever answers their call.”

“Death is a natural part of medicine.”

“There would be less of it if you returned alongside the men.” 

Without warning, I am tossed on the hard-packed dirt of our tent, thrown from my position sitting on top of Achilles’ hips. Achilles stands, draping a tunic over himself. The oil on his back makes greased stains on his back, clinging in odd shapes. 

Before I can catch him, he is gone. Vanished through the flaps of our tent as if swallowed. 

*****

The sweet grass smells of ripe melon and brushes at my ankles. Leaves swell fat with summer rains and I try to pretend I am not nervous. Achilles and I have not spoken since the day before. But Briseis proves a natural mediator, and she insists we resolve our differences. Achilles approaches from behind a thicket of leaves, eyes dull and his smooth forehead darkens at the brow when he spots me. 

“Slow day in the physicians’ tent?”

“There’s no such thing as a slow day in war,” I answer. Maybe too tersely. Achilles stops within ten feet of me. Even from here I catch his faint scent, smoke and pomegranate and salt. 

“I didn’t agree to see you for this.” 

“Our soldiers, Helen’s fate—the glory of Greece is on your shoulders. And your reputation.” 

“Those are Agamemnon’s words, not yours. And I’m no servant of Agamemnon.” Achilles and Agamemnon have scarcely cooled from their spat over Briseis, despite the stitching of time to seal the rift between them.

“They call you craven.” I swallow and try to forget the evidence of my own cowardice, hanging back from the front lines of battle and dawdling my way across fields of bodies heaped in a tangle of limbs, bloated bellies and bile. My spear still as sharp as the day it was forged, not once wetted with the blood of men. 

Achilles jaw tightens, teeth gnashing against one another. His fists curl to white. He could thrash me in less than a minute. His lithe form turned to me, dense-packed with muscle. He hesitates. The leaves in the grove around us shiver in the wind and a few errant leaves take flight like birds in the wind. 

I step to him only an inch and he lunges. I stumble back but lose my footing and slip to the ground. His arms are wrapped around my chest and reaching down to the small of my back and he is trying to pin me but all I can think is how I have missed his touch. We roll together as clouds of dust are raised in nebulas around us. Our tunics streak with dirt. The bridge of my nose and the bony ridge of my eye socket collide with the earth in a burst of pain that makes me grit my teeth.

“You’re bleeding.” Achilles says. I feel only a slow drip of wet heat down the side of my cheek, but Achilles charts its course—ignoring our wrestling match in the process. 

“I’m winning,” I challenge. I raise my right arm above my head and twist it down across the nape of Achilles’ neck, flattening his chin to the dust. He grunts and writhes beneath me. But I swing a leg over him and sit myself squarely on the small of his back. One of his wrists twists from my grasp and I know he could easily take a fist to my temple, leaving me in a dizzying flash of white, or cut across my into my liver and while I double over, slough me off him and press the hard, bone length of forearm against my neck. But he doesn’t. 

One, two, three, four, five. Achilles stops moving under me. He pants in hard gusts. I collapse on my back beside him while he rolls over to face the sky blazing blue overhead. Large triremes of clouds skim by. 

“You’ve just fought the best warrior in all of Greece.”

“Only because you let me win.”

He breathes a laugh. “It still counts.” We pause a minute to listen at the low harmonies of the forest. The beating of wings. The hum of the sea echoing off the trunks of cypress. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I return. And silently, I think: _like a bird misses the wind. Like waves miss the shore. Like a good soldier misses war._

*****

I look foolish in my breastplate armor. It’s gathered dust from being so long abandoned but the dull shine of bronze remains. But I watch Achilles dress beside me with ease, breastplate, helmet, and shield. A second skin. 

He is a carved statue with close-cropped hair. Even with the covering, his shape is unmistakable. Yet his helmet hides the softer curves of his cheeks and his high brow and it makes him look serious, very serious. And threatening. 

I balk at the weight of the shield he hands me. My arms had forgotten how heavy it was. But Achilles carries all of himself on air. A God traipsing over strands of clouds and laughing at mortal men. 

It is only at Achilles’ insistence that I have agreed to accompany him. It is the only way he agreed to resume fighting. If I am to follow him, I am to follow him everywhere. Into battle. Into the grave. And I do not express loyalties I cannot deliver, and so I accept, staring across the battlefield huddled beside him in the haze of early morning, the sun a faint mollusk of pink. 

All remains still. Only the vast grid of soldiers that fan out before us. There is an electricity to everything, the inner workings of my body pulsing to an invisible rhythm. My veins are raised in blue ridges through skin. I can feel each individual hair that the wind brushes and there’s an awareness of the body that is almost the opposite of being drunk. For the first time, I understand why Achilles enjoys battle. Not for the fighting, but for what comes before.

I watch him now, hoping for a stolen smile before we are called. But his thoughts are far away. But I know he feels it too, the veins and the charged winds. The Gods are here with us.

Armor creaks all at once and like a great machine the lines of soldiers lift their feet, first walking, then charging down the hill into the approaching black line of Trojans. Before anyone can see, I slip my hand into Achilles’ one last time. He squeezes back.

Then everything comes in a rush and as we begin to run It feels like we are flying.


End file.
